Hi, I need advice from all of you regarding SEO fo my site. I'm already ranking in top 10 for some keywords of my website. Now I'm planning to change the content and look of my website. I want to know will it affect my ranking and what measures I can take to avoid drop of ranking. I'm planning to switch from static html site to joomla based site. Regards
yes, content will DEFINITELY affect how your site is viewed by SE. Parameters like keyword density, placement of keywords in important tags like title, <h1>, <h2>, etc will also change. But i'm a firm believer of not compromising content for the sake of SEO. Content will always win in the end. So if you think changing the content will improve the quality of your site, go ahead and bite the bullet. you will be rewarded in the long run.....
As what mentioned by the above two posters, content change is challenging.. If you have to change the content anyhow, make sure your keywords still appear in the page and the overall content length should not be longer than the current one.
If you change the code too much, the SE may look at your page in a different way which can affect your ranking.
if i am not wrong, ur content should be above ur navigation. u wun want google to read ur navigation (which is duplicated) before reading ur content. other than that, i am not sure how changing the layout is gonna affect anything, unless ur new coding is that bad and full of errors (which i doubt so)
i got it from brad collen (can't rmb his name) ebook. that applies for tables, not sure bout div layouts. since the bot reads from left to right, top to bottom, ur content should be in a cell before the cell that holds all the navigation links in that order (that means, cell in a row above navigation, or in a column left of navigation). since div dun use cells, i am not sure if it applies.
Regarding what Zenite said about content above navigation.... Google places more weight on the first 30(dont quote me on that) lines of code for a page. The idea behind putting your content above that is so Google places more weight on the actual content of your page rather then something like your navigation. Ive heard that doing this can make huge POSITIVE changes in your SERPs... To do it, simply place your content above your navigation then use CSS to position it back down where it should go...
As its commonly said that changes in design will not affect the ranking and the canges in content will afect the ranking. But the change in design will also reflect the ranking as if there exists completely different TR & TD in the page. Crawling becomes critical in case there are loops in the tags
I'm sure if you change the layout of your site then the placement of where your keyword are will be different, so it will effect it in some way. Even things down to img tag names and title tags will make a difference. Of course file naming will also be part of it. You may want to find out how search engine friendly Joomla is first before taking the plunge. I know they are working on 1.5 and am waiting on that one...You can read about it on the developer section under roadmap.
When you say change in content, can that just mean adding content which isn't on the homepage, im thinking ecommerce here
If you're going to change that content it will affect your rankings. But if you have trust in yourself that you can bring your site back from it's better position then go for it.
i say changing design does affect your page ranking because search engines do place importance on where page elements are located because their location has to do with their proximity to the content which is unique to the webpage. keyword combinations derived from navigation and other universal page elements will have their rankings affected by whether these universal elements are found at the top, left side, right side, or bottom of the page, relative to the page's unique content.
I always keep changing the design of my site but keep the same content (improve content sometime) and i only see my site ranking improve not drop. so i think changing design not effect much but if change content to not the same one will effect a lots. Just try change it and see the rank ifit droped just change it back to the old one. (like i said my case always better in rank so i dont need to change back) remeber to back up your old design before implemented new one. I always forgot and that's a pain in the....!